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En medio de transformaciones económicas, políticas y sociales que se implementan desde el 2009, en la sociedad cubana, cuyas consecuencias se visibilizan en diferentes dimensiones de la equidad, así como en procesos culturales, en la subjetividad, percepción y aspiraciones de las personas; apunta como cada vez más necesario analizar las formas de conducirse dentro del referido campo religioso, el uso de las prácticas del mismo y las redes de relaciones que se estructuran para ello. Este artículo tiene como objetivo analizar procesos de diferenciación/desigualdad social que se generan como efecto de las lógicas de funcionamiento de la religión y a partir de la estructuración de las/os practicantes al interior del campo Regla de Osha-Ifá o Santería, así como del aprovechamiento de la estructura de oportunidades en el contexto de las alusivas transformaciones.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, south Florida became a hub of Afro-Cuban religious practice. The influx of Cuban immigrants has influenced healthcare institutions in the area. This article explores how devotees of one Afro-Cuban religion, Lucumí, popularly known as Santería, create space within hospitals to conduct religious rituals that facilitate the healing of patients. It argues that the creation of space for hospital rituals is a counter-hegemonic practice that can be mapped onto the relationship that Lucumí historically had to the Catholic Church, one of being both seen and unseen within this hegemonic institution. Through an analysis of the “symbolic power” embedded in language usage to create unsanctioned ritual space in the hospital, I build on Pierre Bourdieu’s work by that title. In examining three types of space—secret space, talking space, and familiarity space— this article highlights the counter-hegemonic practices used to heal Lucumí patients in south Florida. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of a more extensive research work on the oracular system of the snail [Mones 2022]. The article, as a part of a previous work, it is expressly dedicated to the review of the postulates of some authors on certain categories used in the analysis of the religious system of the Regla de Ocha. In order to structurally analyze the ritual system, it is necessary to examine the link of its main categories with the oracle, as well as with the concept of person managed within the ritual system. This proposal is aimed exclusively at bibliographic analysis and dialogue with these authors. Which was revealed fundamental for the development of fieldwork, reflected in the original research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an interpretation is attempted of the Romanian myth, “Legenda despre zidirea lumii”. Parallels are drawn with tales such as Genesis, the Babylonian narrative of Marduk constructing the world from Tiamat, and the Norse sto­ry of Odin shaping the world from Ymir. In the Romanian myth, Satan’s prideful omis­sion to enunciate God’s blessing as he collects sand results in the formation of varied terrains. His attempt to harm God inadvertently spreads divine blessings all over the world. Similarly, in Norse and Yoruba myths, stifling barriers and attempts at desecra­tion lead to the paradoxical spreading of life and blessings, emphasizing the unforeseen outcomes of resistance to divine will.

The Mexican city of Catemaco is famous for its diversity of African-American religious traditions. Although Santería was originally shaped in Cuba, the local Mexican versions show not only a variety of references regarding their origins and influences, ranging from West Africa and Cuba to local indigenous traditions, but also (re)interpretations of historically and geographically diverse contents. Based on interview data gathered during field research in 2017, this article outlines the different hybrid (re)configurations of African-Mexican Santería in Catemaco by tracing the changes made by the practitioners in order to adapt existing traditions. The corresponding adaptation processes include beliefs, practices, lore and material assets. Under a critical perspective, concepts of transnationalism, syncretism and glocalization are discussed, focussing on the dynamics between local and global aspects of Santería in Catemaco and shedding light on the processes of inclusion, exclusion and the shift of boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this volume, we bring together research on African derived Religions in Latin America and African American Religions in the USA. Theoretically, the concepts of hybridity and syncretism are discussed, in the introduction as well as in the papers included. The papers featured deal with Brazilian Umbanda, Cuban Santería, US African Black Hebrew Israelites, the Five Percenter movement (an offspring of the Nation of Islam), and one single person, Robert T. Browne, an activist in the Black Nationalist movement. In the religions covered – that are an outcome of the historical circumstances of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade – elements taken from West and Central African traditions, European Christianity, and Kardecian Spiritism blend to new forms of religious movements. This being the "fundamental" transformation of religion addressed here, some essays in the volume also look at the further transformation of those traditions in a "glocalized" world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Animal victims of human cruelty are receiving increasing attention from the press and society. Veterinary pathologists and civic authorities have a duty not only to elucidate the cause, method and manner of death but also to address the motivation behind a case. Poultry are commonly used as offering to gods in Santería rituals (ebós). Only a few cases have been reported in scientific journals, in contrast with the number of cases described in the media. Here, a hen and a cockerel (Gallus domesticus) were submitted to the VISAVET Health Surveillance Centre for autopsy, which comprised macroscopic and histological studies and microbiological testing for Chlamydia psittaci , avian orthoavulavirus 1 (Newcastle disease virus), West Nile virus and avian influenza virus. The carcasses were in an active decay stage of decomposition, containing larvae of Lucilia eximia. Both animals had been decapitated and haemorrhages in the cutting region were observed histologically. Post-mortem burns were also observed. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first post-mortem description of lesions in a domestic avian species due to religious rituals. European Union and Spanish forensic practitioners should be aware that these ritual sacrifices occur in some European countries. Moreover, future European and national legislation updates should consider this type of animal abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of human capital is born. This article analyzes how is ruled this human asset in the history. It has a journey since the creation of Israel to high technology organizations the great sport teams and the non-formal organizations, as the Italian mafia and the afrocuban religion (Santeria). It were analyzed some excellence firms in the world and the main management thinking tendencies. The article proposes the university-firm relation, in order to obtain the most effectiveness in the human capital management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El presente artículo indaga en las intersecciones entre etnoracialidad —con blanquitud y lo afrocubano como categorías analíticas claves— y religiosidad popular en Cuba, referida a las prácticas mágico-religiosas de origen africano, con énfasis en la santería o regla de Ocha. Partimos del análisis de lo afrocubano como un objeto teórico y cultural construido por las élites intelectuales blancas, donde las narrativas desde la blanquitud operan como definición exclusiva de lo negro y su lugar en la cubanidad. Desde estos antecedentes nos acercamos al fenómeno de creciente adscripción a las religiones afrocubanas de personas, dentro y fuera de la isla, que se consideran a sí mismas como blancas. ¿Cómo se construye y se sitúa la blanquidad en un contexto de prácticas religiosas que históricamente han estado asociadas a comunidades negras? Consideramos que la promoción de las otrora «religiones de negros pobres», con énfasis en la santería o regla de Ocha-Ifa, a nuevo estandarte de la cubanidad exige un enfoque centrado en los sujetos que garantizan la supervivencia de estas prácticas.

Photo essay featuring the work of and behind the scences photos from Rittoles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este artículo analiza la adaptación cinematográfica de la novela 59 Degrees and Raining: The Story of Perdita Durango de Álex la Iglesia, contextualizando la literatura de Barry Gifford, su imaginario cinematográfico, su relación con la industria y con otros directores. Se consideran los referentes sobre los que se sistematiza el argumento del libro y su adaptación, así como los nexos, influencias y omisiones en los que se fundamenta el trasvase. El trabajo concluye con la correlación postmodernista de ambos relatos, en los que se articula la cita como una rememoración de la imagen cinematográfica en el imaginario colectivo.

Cuba constitutes a site of immense importance for the history of jazz (and Latin jazz) in the United States, and attention to the contributions of Cuban women artists contributes to a broader understanding of the gendered histories of global jazz. This article explores women jazz artists in Cuba and its diaspora, excavating how women instrumentalists and vocalists have transformed the landscape of Cuban, Latin, and global jazz through groundbreaking and experimental performances. I attend to how the fusion-centered approaches of Cuban women unearth an emic orientation towards collaborative experimentalism that builds upon specific, local histories of jazz performance on the island. These performances draw upon histories of revolutionary-era musical experimentalism and fusion (fusión) that have emerged since the late 1960s and 1970s in Cuba and which repeatedly tie jazz experimentalism closely--though not categorically--to dance forms (both popular and ritual). Amid Cuba's intensifying economic crises, I additionally engage how women regularly pursue careers--and, in an overwhelming number of cases, emigration--to Spain, Canada, the continental United States, Puerto Rico, and other international locales, in turn impacting local and translocal jazz scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conflict between science and spirituality is an established fact, even though some scholars dispute this reality arguing that it is rather unfashionable for contemporary academic inquiry. The present study interrogates the foregoing position, submitting that the conflict between the two fields of knowledge still subsists. It advocates the recognition of spirituality as an alternative knowledge field, despite its lack of deductive, empirical procedures. The proposition builds on the reality of existential risks threatening humanity which can be adequately tackled if the two domains collaborate to develop mechanisms for ending human misery. Using syncretism/hybridity as a conceptual touchstone, the article attempts a postcolonial reading of Irete Lazo's The Accidental Santera (2008) to pontificate about the imperativeness of mutuality between science and spirituality, and the danger inherent in a branch of knowledge displaying hubristic, overweening attitude towards another knowledge field. The study further suggests a new order to reposition the knowledge fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forced to succumb to a life of enslavement, African-turned-Afro-Caribbean slaves devel- oped a collective image of their beloved homeland and forged an unbreakable chain of solidarity among their many ethnicities. The collective recreation of Africa as manifest in the imagination of Afro-Caribbean slaves through the practice of Cuban Santería and Haitian Vodou in sixteenth- to eigh- teenth-century Cuba and Haiti catalyzed their resistance to European subjugation. In partic- ular, these recreated cultural memories served as a foundation for the enslaved to subvert the dominant culture and resist enslavement. Syncretism fails to properly acknowledge the Afro-Caribbean slaves’ efforts in challenging the imperial regime and the role these efforts played in maintaining their African roots. The tumultuous yet hopeful history through which Cuban Santería and Haitian Vodou evolved reveals that the African spirit continuously takes on new forms but never dies.

Harlem's historic Sugar Hill neighborhood possesses several public parks and cemeteries used by African and Afro-Caribbean Diaspora communities for religious activities. In my research, I have identified and mapped sites of religious activities and conducted interviews with community members, revealing how practitioners of Santería, Vodou, and Yoruba traditions have adapted to their urban home via the use of public space. The religious traditions explored here require interaction with nature and the physical land. Therefore, I argue that public space serves as critical infrastructure for facilitating the practice of these religious traditions. I build on the views of Erika Svendsen, Lindsay Campbell, and Heather McMillen that practitioners who engage in this use of public space derive a psycho-socialspiritual benefit from those spaces, while simultaneously contributing to the diversity and democracy of these public spaces as Frederick Law Olmsted and others have theorized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following bell hooks’ submission that theory making is “a location for healing” (2017, 59) “The Shape of Humidity: Performing Black Atlantic Theory Making” riffs upon the historically critical and widely circulated subject of the black body politic and Atlantic waters informing but non-exclusive to performance, art history, and visual cultural discourses. The theory making performed here alternatively frames the black Atlantic body in relation to humidity, illustrating what Deleuze and Guattari might call the “possibles” evoked through “a contraction of earth and humidity” (Deleuze 1994, 76–78). The theory is shaped upon a discussion of Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream (1899), included in Kara Walker’s cultural-political opus, Kara Walker: After The Deluge (2006), mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Theory making confronts the painting’s adherence to the hegemonic tradition of rendering the black Atlantic body as a perennial form in peril, whose destiny in this instance is as matter consumed by the thermodynamic sublimity of the waters. Alternatively, the action of theory making here collapses space-time separations among black Atlantic flora, the healing processes of artists Lygia Clark and Wangechi Mutu, and modes of breath activation, to access states of limitlessness actualized through bodily openness to humidity’s grace.

Rita Indiana's La mucama de Omicunlé challenges conventional articulations of the materiality of the body and its interaction with the natural environment. The protagonists do not merely inhabit the environment, rather, the environment inhabits them and challenges their separation from the natural world. In this article, I argue that by reading La mucama de Omicunlé through a lens of queer materiality, Indiana's novel uncovers two important considerations for the interaction between humankind and nature in the twenty-first century. First, she reveals the exigencies of reconceptualising humankind's interaction with and understanding of nature as a materially separate being from humankind. Secondly, Indiana represents a specifically Caribbean cosmology, one that goes beyond European and North American ontological states. The representation of this cosmology is achieved through the coexistence of past, present, and future, combined with the protagonists' doubling through space and time. Through the act of narrative generation, Indiana both represents and creates a material reality that dismantles static and fixed readings of the materiality of time, space, and being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the first in-depth discussion of the Afro-diasporic spiritual world of boat people (2005), a brief collection of poetry by Mayra Santos-Febres, a leading Afro-Puerto Rican author. Critics have generally read boat people as recounting the plight of undocumented Dominican migrants who cross the treacherous ocean in an attempt to reach Puerto Rico (and by extension, the United States). I argue, however, that boat people cannot be geographically contained, and one of the primary ways in which the text places itself at the juncture of Caribbean and Latina/o/x Studies is by means of its engagement with water. In boat people, Santos-Febres transforms the sea into a powerful agential presence that absorbs the bodies and souls of the undocumented migrants who traverse its waters. Brimming with aché and having borne witness to the traumatic journeys of Caribbean bodies and spirits for centuries, Santos-Febres's spiritualized sea is infused with the energy of the orishas of Santería/Regla de Ocha, the iwas of Haitian Vodou, Indigenous Taíno resistance, and the impetus of countless ancestral forces. In direct contrast to the erasure imposed on undocumented maritime migration by media and governments, boat people recovers and affirms the humanity of the drowned Black body, and especially of the Black female migrant body, evincing its contribution to current debates on migration and to the field of Afro-Latina/x feminisms. It also reveals water's potential for fostering dialogue between Caribbean, Chicana/o/x, and Latina/o/x Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary retranslation and circulation of Lucumí songs for the orishas (deities) among devotees and scholars in Cuba inadvertently reproduces both the sources and methods of Ortiz's earliest linguistic ventures and reinforces his enduring influence on popular understandings of Santería's utterances. This article draws on research in Cuba in 2018 in partnership with a Nigerian priestess, which revealed the processes, aspirations, and mixed results of contemporary Lucumí song translation efforts. As many Cuban priests granted her religious authority largely on the basis of her Yoruba language knowledge, the hierarchies of translation revealed themselves within a changing global setting. While Ortiz's theory of transculturation recognized the agency of subaltern groups in stimulating cultural change, this article demonstrates that translation is an intrinsically asymmetrical intercultural communication. The linguistic processes of contemporary Nigerian-Cuban priestly encounters resemble Ortiz's philological speculations, yet may also engender change and sustained religious influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 2009 release of Disney's The Princess and the Frog, critiques from within religious studies have focused on the role of its villain, Dr. Facilier, and its stereotypical distortions of Haitian Vodou. These are but a fraction of the allusions made to Black Atlantic traditions, however; several scenes contain artifacts pulled from the material cultures of Afro-Brazilian Umbanda and Quimbanda, as well as Afro-Cuban Abakuá, Palo Mayombe, and Lucumí. I demonstrate that filmmakers not only accessed a broader range of ethnographically-informed sources than has been acknowledged, but also engaged in their own ethnographic data collection with Vodou and "Yorùbá" priestess Ava Kay Jones. As a result, the film reproduces an extensively-documented discourse promulgated by practitioners of Afro-Diasporic religions concerning the (im)morality of magic. The film even follows Jones and the foundational scholarly literature on Black Atlantic traditions in furnishing characters with ethnically differentiated props and dwellings, coded as either proximate (Black and West African) or Other (Caribbean and Central African). I argue that filmmakers erred primarily in harboring a Protestant normative bias and depicting things endowed with agency according to the logic of the fetish. I conclude by proposing strategies for more ethically viable future representation of Black Atlantic traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I compare the status of a sacred language in two very different religious traditions. In Judaism, the Hebrew language is the language of liturgy, prayer, and the Written Law. The traditional way of reading Torah passages involved translating them into Aramaic, the everyday language of communication in the Middle East in the first half of the first millennium CE. Later, other Jewish languages, such as Yiddish, played a role similar to that of Aramaic in the Talmudic period, constituting a system referred to as the “Traditional Jewish Bilingualism”. Hebrew lexemes had denotations related to the realm of Biblical texts, while Aramaic/Yiddish lexemes had everyday references. Therefore, the act of translation connected the two realms or domains. The Lucumí (Santería) Afro-Cuban religion is a syncretic tradition combining Roman Catholicism with the Ifá tradition, which does not have a corpus of written sacred texts, however, it has its sacred language, the Lucumí (Anagó) language related to the Yoruba language of West Africa. While the Spanish-Lucumí bilingualism plays an important role in Santería rituals, the mechanisms of reference are very different from those of the Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism in Judaism. In Santería, divinations about the meaning of Lucumí words play a role similar to the translations from Hebrew in Judaism. I further discuss the role of ritual dances in Santería for the transition from the sacred to the secular domain and a function of Hebrew epitaphs to connect the ideal world of Hebrew sacred texts to the everyday life of a Jewish community.

In this essay I explore how oricha (deities’) voice is produced in and through Cuban Santería practices that render oricha speech audible, meaningful, and quotable. In the semiotic order governing Cuban popular religious practice, human bodies and other objects can be “activated” as instruments of oricha speech. Divination objects such as cowry shells are understood to be the “tongue” of the oricha, through which the deities and spirits of the dead speak just as surely as when speaking through a possessed devotee or transmitting a message through a human medium. Oricha voices emerge most audibly in divinations and possession speech, although I will argue that the material processes that produce them exceed these specific ritual moments, and that orichas also can speak outside of ritual settings that elicit them. The analysis shows how approaching voice as a material phenomenon, sensible and physical, also activates its potential as a marker of social personhood, agentive force, and even biographical individuality. I trace the qualia of materials themselves and in flows of material substances and interconversions across objects, each contributing their own affordances, to argue for the central importance of transduction or signal conversion across media, and equilibration or the production of equivalences in producing oricha voice.

García Márquez's final full length novel, Del amor y otros demonios (1994), presents various difficulties to the reader. The novel's layers of symbolism are readily identifiable with references in the novel to Roman Catholic hagiographies in juxtaposition to qualities and characteristics of the Orishas of the Yoruba Tradition. The period of the novel corresponds temporally with the formation of the syncretic religion known as Santería. The author's use of period techniques such as conceptismo emphasizes the baroque era on a structural level. Furthermore, conceptismo plays a major role in the evolution of themes in the novel, which on final analysis shows distinct parallels with one of the earliest hagiographies of the Roman Catholic corpus. At the same moment, the strings of metaphors and doubling of motifs may also point to extraliterary texts. Those points stated, the novel's African influences may be traced back to one of the author's first stories, "Nabo el negro que hizo esperar a los ángeles" (1951), not merely as a reiteration of themes but as a means of analyzing the earlier piece with a more complete view of the author's aesthetic trajectory. This leads to a clearer understanding of the place of Afro- Caribbean religion in García Márquez's works as well as the ultimate refinement of his technical abilities as a novelist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the corrections that should be taken into consideration about the Afro-Latin-Americain religious field from the exemplary case of the introduction of Cuban’s traditional Ifa’s cult into Brazilian candomblé. The ritual negotiation generated in Brazil by the meeting of different regional modes – Nigerian, Cuban and Brazilian – of Orishas’ cult, highlights the challenges of a religious transnationalisation which deeply modifies the balance, often fragile, among the characteristics of Afro-American cultures.

The article reports on a fundamental rites of Santeria or the Rule of Osha, a spiritual practice of African origin and deep roots in Cuba. Becoming a saint represents a kind of baptism, a rebirth before those black gods, temperamental and contradictory as Greek deities. It refers to iyawo, the generic name of the newly consecrated in the Yoruba religion.

This article examines the ways in which Afro-Caribbean superheroes engage with questions of identity, movement and belonging as they embody diverse and culturally hybrid populations within the North American imaginary. First engaging with scholarship regarding the writing of race and marginalized cultures in US comics to situate the Santerians, Brother Voodoo/Doctor Voodoo and Groot within the larger comic book oeuvre, it turns to explore how these Marvel characters incorporate the myths and spiritual powers of Cuban/Puerto Rican Santería and Haitian Vodou into the metropolitan narratives in which they are depicted. As corporeal representations of these religions within the cultural landscapes of New York City and New Orleans, these transnational superheroes have each been physically and/or culturally displaced to the margins but see their hybrid identities valorized to greater or lesser degrees within the cultural framework of the metropolis. However, in spite of these characters having challenged stereotypical and hegemonic representations of racial and ethnic alterity, they are still subject to a clear hierarchy between the metropolis and the periphery. This is most clearly communicated through the restrictions and processes of othering that the Santerians and Brother Voodoo/Doctor Voodoo suffer, in comparison to the success and global mobility enjoyed by those more established characters alongside which they appear. As such, although the writing of these characters is both culturally sensitive and has permitted the development of new knowledges within the comic metropolis, at the same time these superheroes remain subordinate to their white, metropolitan counterparts and see themselves marginalized within very narrative that has sought to celebrate their transnational and hybrid identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syncretism and Symbolism. The Case of the Cuban santeria • This essay explores how Cuban Santeria is an important example of 'mystical syncretism', as a site of cultural memory and identity of the Yoruba people, transplanted to the Americas during the period of transatlantic slavery. Santeria is the extraordinary result of the synthesis of Yoruba religious Pantheon and Christianity, in particular Catholicism. As a fact, over the centuries, the yoruba orishas and Catholic saints have been the avatar of a same deity. This essay proposes that Santeria is a religious practice characterised by esotericism and secrecy. In this sense, initiation into Santeria corresponds to the beginning of a journey of awareness, and the acquisition of that power embodied by the orishas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Photo essay featuring the work of and behind the scences photos from Cruzata and Molina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Originating among the Yorùbá of West Africa, Ifá is an ancient spiritual system that spread throughout the globe due to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. But over the past 50 years because of a desire among various racial and ethnic groups, Ifá has grown and is seen as a ‘world religion’. Within Ifá resides the Orisha, representational forces serving the greater force of the Universe. Urban and rural natural environments are sacred spaces for practitioners as tourists to interact and communicate with these forces to intercede in their daily lives. This article will present the underlying environmental ethics of the system of Ifá and how it informs nature-based tourism and interactions with nature for both leisure and spiritual development. What is presented is a continued broadening of our understanding of differing cultural views, norms and behaviours with nature that has been initiated by Native-American-based scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any exploration of Fidel Castro racist views toward negro/as, or lack thereof, remains problematic if Cuban history is ignored; specifically, how negra/o identity was constructed differently than U.S. Black identity. As long as we keep the focus on the individual Fidel, we ignore the continuous structural racism faced by Cuban negra/os. Fidel, like most White Cubans, was influenced and shaped by how negro/as been historically seen, and by how bodies with darker hues continue to be constructed by the Revolution. Fidel, along with White Cubans, are part of a habitus which has taught us how to see, how to gaze upon negro/as. The question with which we should wrestle is how aware we Cubans who possess light-skin pigmentation are about our complicity with racist structures in Cuba? How has Cuban history and the construction of negro/a identity continued to manifest itself during the Fidel years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any exploration of Fidel Castro racist views toward negro/as, or lack thereof, remains problematic if Cuban history is ignored; specifically, how negra/o identity was constructed differently than U.S. Black identity. As long as we keep the focus on the individual Fidel, we ignore the continuous structural racism faced by Cuban negra/os. Fidel, like most White Cubans, was influenced and shaped by how negro/as been historically seen, and by how bodies with darker hues continue to be constructed by the Revolution. Fidel, along with White Cubans, are part of a habitus which has taught us how to see, how to gaze upon negro/as. The question with which we should wrestle is how aware we Cubans who possess light-skin pigmentation are about our complicity with racist structures in Cuba? How has Cuban history and the construction of negro/a identity continued to manifest itself during the Fidel years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so-called Transatlantic Traffic imposed new linguistical and cultural configurations on the three continents involved in this tragedy: Africa, America and Europe. Such configurations acquire a complex of dynamics that, nowadays, we speak of flux and reflux of traffic, because of the intense and broad cultural and social exchange between these continents. Religion is one of the main or fundamental elements that is diluted in the cultural exchanges between Africa and America, especially those of the so called Sudanese nations, which receive various denominations: santeria, vodun, and Candomblé, among others. I will deal with the presentation of the Jeje nagô pattern in order to promote a dialogue, taking in account manifestation in Cuba, Haiti, Brazil and Benin. I will choose, describe and analyse from a comparative perspective a sample of songs and ritual lexicon (including terms of kinship) of Dahomean and Ewé-Fon origin in arará santeria, vodun in Haiti, and Mina-jeje candomblé in Brazil in one part of the study, and in the other part, with the vodun of Benin. This experience will undoubtedly shed light on the diversity and richness of meanings attributed from cultural and social relations in religious spaces and in society as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how hybrid bodies like the transgendered oricha (deity) of Inle from Cuban Santeria are understood in Caribbean mythology, literature, and folklore. Also cited are poet Edouard Glissant's concept of transphysical poetics via the representation of performance, sexuality, and vernacular religiosity, as well as the relationships of gender, sexuality, and place in circumCaribbean.

The article approaches the musical dramaturgy of Ebbô (1998), an opera-oratorio by Cuban composer Louis Aguirre, from a holistic perspective. It directs special attention to the formal, structural, and syntactic aspects of the work's musical discourse, while also delving into the Afro-Cuban religious and music-cultural references that converge in its network of meanings. The close identification of the work with the religious system of OchaTfâ, as well as the composer's experiences as a practitioner of Afro-Cuban religions (Palo Monte and OchaTfâ, popularly known as Santeria), require an introduction to the philosophical, ethical, and symbolic universe of Yoruba origin that defines Cuban Santeria. Ebbô, more than a representative work of late twentieth-century trends in Cuban music theater, stands as an avatar for a new type of singular, avant-garde Afro-Cuban aesthetic. It is an expression of the continuity and reinvention of a religious, aesthetic, and musical heritage deeply rooted in the Afro-Caribbean cultural patrimony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Candomblé is an African-Brazilian religion that resulted from the adaptation of West African (especially Yoruba) beliefs in Brazil during and after the slave trade. This study seeks to understand the current evolution of Candomblé ethnobotanical knowledge as it travels from Brazil to New York City (NYC), therefore going through a second adaptation process. We identified which Brazilian plant species are still in use, which are being incorporated and/or replaced, and what factors are contributing to the ethnobotanical adaptation that is taking place in NYC. To accomplish this, we compiled an inventory of liturgical plants used by five highly skilled Candomblé practitioners living in NYC and then compared the vernacular and binomial Latin names of these plants to inventories previously published in Brazil by other authors. By doing this, we were able to distinguish patterns of knowledge continuity, assimilation, or substitution. Nearly two-thirds of the species identified in NYC’s inventory were cases of knowledge continuity, where most plants were used by at least four practitioners. Many of these frequently used species have survived the adaptation process from Africa to Brazil, and now from Brazil to NYC. Practitioners also assimilated (20%) and substituted (16%) some species. The assimilation process was mainly influenced by Santería, another Yoruba-derived religion widely practiced in NYC. Substitutions, however, were driven by two distinct forces. In one cohort (7%), species were morphologically and organoleptically similar to the original material, and replacements were mostly influenced by the easy accessibility of botanical materials. The other cohort (9%) was marked by a logical substitution process based on Yoruba rules of plant classification. Our results show that Candomblé practitioners in NYC are maintaining a notable level of cultural continuity, while cautiously assimilating new species and consciously or subconsciously replacing others. Although both accessibility of plant material and cultural forces play a role in the adaptation mechanism, the latter appears to be the most relevant to these highly skilled practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the way genealogical approaches to religion have not been able to take into account how the production of knowledge, including religious knowledge, affects global politics. Specifically, it is concerned with the production of expert testimony, which is used to provide the evidentiary basis for a new industry of civil and human rights claims and protections. I explore how genealogical approaches to religion offer a way to see that the constructs we understand to be religion were produced and rendered legible through the formation of contemporary constructions of knowledge and power. I demonstrate that-through these approaches-in order for religious protections to be acknowledged in legal domains, they also need to be rendered visible and legible to the law. Ultimately, I argue that the production of these knowledge practices into portable knowledge packages enables courts to assess issues that have resulted from the migration of ethnic and religious groups; but they also tell us a lot about the limits of genealogical approaches in understanding fully the complexities of Black Atlantic religious practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite recent attention to issues of religious diversification, mobility, and multiplicity, few sociologists have attended to the socio-cognitive dimensions of multiple religious participation. Sociologists have long suggested that the socio-mental processes involved in the addition of new religions differ from those found in religious conversion, but more work is needed to fill out this process. In particular, we need to move beyond seeing religious addition as simply a partial or lesser version of conversion. Analyzing narratives of people who include religious participation in African-derived traditions alongside other religious involvement may be particularly instructive in this regard, as they have an extensive history of multiple religious involvement. In the present article, I draw from interviews with Lukumi and Ifa multiple religious participators in the United States, noting three patterns in the narratives that display a sociomental "style" that may distinguish multiple religious participators from converts more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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[First paragraph] Ritual, Discourse and Community in Cuban Santería: Speaking a Sacred World. Kristina Wirtz. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.xxiv + 253 pp. (Cloth US $ 59.95) Crossing the Waters: A Photographic Path to the Afro-Cuban Spirit World. Claire Garoutte & Anneke Wambaugh. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2007. xiii + 258 pp. (Paper US $ 24.95) In recent years, the literature on Santería has grown by leaps and bounds. Check the call number BL2532.S3 in the Library of Congress online catalogue, and you will see that, as of January 2009, the number of acquisitions it includes has reached exactly one hundred, with thirty new additions since the beginning of the millennium! Of course, BL2532.S3 locates a somewhat heterogeneous array of publications – ranging, as they do, from full-fledged academic monographs to practitioners’ manuals and memoirs, or the type of flimsy booklet one is likely to encounter in dog-eared versions in the book market at Havana’s Plaza de Armas. But it is clear that even specialists are nowadays likely to throw up their hands in despair over the dwindling prospects of being able to keep up with this flood of representations of Santería.

[First paragraph] Living Santería: Rituals and Experiences in an Afro-Cuban Religion. MICHAEL ATWOOD MASON. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. ix + 165 pp. (Paper US$ 16.95) Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería. KATHERINE J. HAGEDORN. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. xvi + 296 pp. (Cloth US$ 40.00) The Light Inside: Abakuá Society Arts and Cuban Cultural History. DAVID H. BROWN. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003. xix + 286 pp. (Cloth US$ 44.23) Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion. DAVID H. BROWN. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. xx + 413 pp. (Paper US$ 38.00) Ethnographic objects behave in curious ways. Although they clearly are “our constructions,” field sites and even topically circumscribed (rather than spatially delimited) ethnographic problems lead double lives: places and problems change not merely because they factually undergo historical changes, but because researchers come to them from historically no less changeable epistemic vantage points. One can imagine generational cohorts of ethnographers marching across the same geographically or thematically defined terrain and seeing different things – not just because of substantial changes that have factually occurred, but because they have come to ask different questions. The process obviously has its dialectical moments. The figures we inscribe in writing from fleeting observations (based on changing theoretical conceptions) are no less subject to history than the empirical grounds from which our discursive efforts call them forth. The result is a curious imbrication of partially autonomous, but also partly overlapping, historicities of lives and texts which, at times, are more difficult to keep apart than it would seem at first glance. At least in the study of Afro-Cuban religious culture, the two practical and discursive fields – one circumscribed by the practical, but perhaps misleading label “Afro-Cuban religion,”1 and the other designated by whatever term one might like to affix to the study of it – cannot be easily separated: much as in the Brazilian case (Braga 1995, Capone 1999, Matory 1999, 2001), practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions and their ethnographers have engaged each other in a dialogue since at least the second decade of the twentieth century. That it took us so long to understand this fact has much to do with the way both “Afro-Cuban religion” and “Afro-Cuban ethnography” originally (and lastingly) became discursively objectified: the former largely under the sign of a search for “authentically African” elements in New World cultural practices, the second as an instrument for “verifying” (and thereby authorizing) such “Africanisms” (Scott 1991).

This article studies the works and activities of a group of cultural actors that since the early 1990s have promoted a debate on race and racial discrimination in Cuba. The members of this new Afro-Cuban cultural movement—musicians, visual artists, writers, academics, and activists—have effectively challenged the silence that surrounded the issue of race in the island for decades as well as the official interpretation of the national discourse of racial fraternity. They have denounced the growing racial gap that has characterized Cuban society since the advent of the Special Period and raised important questions about the relationship between race and Cubanidad. These intellectuals grew up in what was for the most part an egalitarian social environment, only to see it deteriorate in front of their own eyes in the 1990s. Their efforts have not been without results. According to several surveys, most Cubans now acknowledge that racism is a problem. Furthermore, authorities now recognize that racial differences continue to exist in Cuba and they have begun to be attentive to issues of representation of blacks in government structures.

In socialist Cuba, local religious practices of Yoruba origin have had a singular fate. Indeed they have gained great visibility as well as a certain level of prestige. Their current status in Cuban society is clearly the result of a particular articulation -during the last fifty years between scientific discourse and political project. This paper examines, in broad outline, how revolutionary power as well as Cuban intellectuals understood these religious practices from 1959 to present time. It underlines the fact that the Revolution, whereas condemning the practice of Afro-Cuban religions has been committed to a real process of patrimonialization of some of santería’s rituals. This process took place, on a more general level, within the frame of the questioning of the Cuban -revolutionary national identity and was explicitly theorized during the 1960-1970’s. It has been finalized in the particular socio-economic context of the last twenty years, loosing at the same time its initial ideological basis.

Roots of the Spirit: Lonnie Holley, Mr. Imagination, Charlie Lucas, Kevin Sampson(September 19–November 26, 2014) at Notre Dame de Namur University's Wiegand Gallery in Belmont, California, presented the deeply rooted and widely ranging work of four untrained African American artists. The influences and intimations of these rich and multilayered pieces are explored in tandem with the richly imbued illustrations ofTheRed Book—created by the also artistically untutored C. G. Jung. Redolent with ritual and mythical themes, theseRootspieces provide numerous exemplars of the sociocultural experience and spiritual foundations of the African American psyche. These foundations have their origin in African ancestral traditions, such as Yoruba, which are examined in conjunction with Jung's African explorations. In addition, the alchemical nature of artistic expression and psychological integration are explored in the context of these two bodies of visual expression. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines Afro-Cuban painter Wifredo Lam and his iconic construction of Afro-Cuban identity. From the vantage point of a literary scholar rather than art historian, and in keeping with Lam's description of his paintings as "poetry," I read his artwork as terse lines of verse, rich in metaphors. Although Lam is regarded as the painter of Negritude, commonly understood as a male-centered movement, he distinguishes himself from his contemporaries by incorporating in his brand of Negritude two female figures as metaphors of the power to decolonize the mind. One of those figures is his Afro-Cuban godmother, Mantonica Wilson. Healer, diviner, and priestess of Shango, she is memorialized by a description of her attributed to Lam and by the poem titled "Mantonica Wilson" that appear in Aimé Césaire's poetry collection moi, laminaire . . . . She is also memorialized in Lam's 1941 and later paintings, whose metaphoric references to an Afro-Cuban spirituality attest to her enduring influence on the visionary world that the artist created. Her presence is most notably sensed in the figure of the femme cheval or horse-headed woman that appears repeatedly in Lam's paintings. Valerie Fletcher notes that "in Santeria symbology a horse signifies the possession or empowerment of a devotee by an orisha; when a practitioner becomes possessed, that person is described as being 'ridden' by that spirit" (my emphasis). The expression of an anti-colonial spiritual force, largely associated with his godmother and the femme cheval, is one of the defining features of Lam's Negritude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ramas, families, networks. The social basis of the diffusion of Cuban santería (Cuba-Mexico). Cuban santería is following a global trend towards transnationalisation, like all of the other so-called Afro-American religions, currently found in West Africa, Europe and across the American continent. In order to grasp the full range of our topic, an analysis in terms of networks seems, at first glance, the best option. Detailed ethnography of the relationships between social actors reveals a complex ramification of individuals and groups connected by one or several intermediary links. However, such an abstract concept as « transnational network » is far from being fully satisfactory. Several contingent realities lurk behind this generic phrase, which we will attempt to refine and test by examining the situation in La Havana and the diffusion of santería in Mexico.

The « lukumisation » of the religions of African origin in Cuba : the case of Sagua la Grande. Santeria or the « Lukumi religion » was born in the western part of Cuba, especially in Havana and Matanzas. After the abolition of slavery (1886) this religion spread to other parts of the island, and in so doing created a process of « lukumisation » of the other religions of African origin. This article will analyse the spread of Santeria towards the eastern part of Cuba and look specifically at the case study of Sagua La Grande.